When asking other teachers for classroom management advice, they would always tell me,”Whatever you do, just make sure you pick your battles.” And then they would walk off like they had just given me the secret password to the Malfoy’s vault at Gringotts. They would leave me standing there with all the people in my head conversing and asking each other,”But what does that even mean!? How do we know what battles we ARE to pick?”
I pondered on this idea for a long time and I’ve asked a lot of teachers what “pick your battles” means to them. I’ve finally found an answer! Are you ready for this? I will explain it as best I can.
There are a lot of inappropriate behaviors in just one class period, but would you agree with me that not all misbehaviors are created equal? Of course they aren’t. There are behaviors that are considered extreme misbehaviors. There are also behaviors that are quite low on the totem pole. So we can first assume that the behaviors that are low on the totem pole are the ones that we don’t “choose” when we pick our battles.
So what do we do when a student is acting annoying? What do we do when a student sharpens his pencil in the middle of you teaching? What do you do when two students are talking?
I will tell you! You need to pick your battles! Just kidding. First we’ll need to divide the classroom behaviors into two categories. The first category is inconsequential behaviors. Inconsequential behaviors are behaviors that are just annoying and aren’t damaging to the classroom environment. Believe it or not, 94% of inappropriate behavior is inconsequential. So, how do we handle inconsequential behavior? Simple! We ignore it.
Yep, you read that right. Just simply ignore inconsequential behavior. You can argue with me all you want, but I will not relent. Research has proven it. I’ll give you one quick example of why we should ignore inconsequential behaviors. A substitute teacher once told me of a time when she was taking roll in a high school class. She was calling out a student’s name when someone started whistling.
She turned to the student and asked him to stop whistling. Pretty soon a student on the other side of the room started whistling. She then turned to that student and asked her to stop whistling. Then another student began whistling and another. Pretty soon most of the class was whistling and the substitute teacher had to ask the principal to come to the classroom and talk to the students about not whistling.
What do you think would have happened if she would have just ignored the first student when he started whistling? I have no idea. It’s something to think about.
Research tells us that most inconsequential behaviors go away within 30 seconds if left alone. So next time a student is tapping her pencil incessantly, try ignoring it (keeping your eye on the clock) and see what happens. Now, there is another category we haven’t even looked at: the remaining 6 percent of inappropriate student behavior.
Consequential behaviors are only about 6% of the inappropriate behaviors you will see in a classroom which will need to be addressed and not just ignored. These consequential behaviors need to be handled non-coercively.
These terms may be new for you, so let me take a minute to define them:
Consequential behaviors are those that have a significant negative effect on the learning environment and interfere with the rights of other students to learn. These are only about six percent of the inappropriate behaviors that happen in the classroom.
Coercion is when a teacher forces a student to do something. Often times people think that handling behaviors non-coercively is only effective in the younger grades, but it’s meant especially for older students.
How does one handle consequential behavior “non-coercively?” It’s easy! Just remove any threat or sarcasm from any discipline action. Instead you will need to stop and redirect that student’s behavior. This can easily be done by:
- Calmly and politely saying something positive,
- Informing the student what his/her misbehavior was, and
- Directing the student to a more appropriate behavior
After 30 seconds the teacher should then praise the student when s/he does behave appropriately.
Teachers often think that there is no way that this can work with students. It’s too simple. In Steven Levitt and Stephen Dunbar’s book Superfreakonomics, they discuss thoroughly the idea that often problems are so complicated that we feel the answers need to be complicated as well. These authors try to convince us that idea is not true; their goal is to find clever, simple solutions to difficult problems.
This is great advice for teachers as well. Even though the classroom management problems seem complicated that doesn’t mean the solutions have to be. Using simple, non-coercive strategies are incredibly effective in managing consequential behavior.